Geno Auriemma

Geno Auriemma
Luigi "Geno" Auriemma is an Italian-born American college basketball coach and the head coach of the University of Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team. He has led UConn to eleven NCAA Division I national championships, a feat matched by no one else in college basketball, and has won seven national Naismith College Coach of the Year awards. Auriemma has been the head coach of the United States women's national basketball team since 2009, during which time his teams won the 2010...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth23 March 1954
CityMontella, Italy
So to me, one way to stop that is don't put us here. Put us somewhere else and at another venue where 2,500 are in the stands. There's always an alternative, you know.
Because of some of the things that we did, the way my players did it, an awful lot of basketball programs decided they wanted to try to be like that. That's probably the thing that I'm most happy about ? the impact that the players at Connecticut had on a lot of players that are playing today.
It's a great barometer for not only what is happening with our team at the moment but what could happen, what might happen down the road. There are times we have played them at our place and played unbelievably well and beat them easily and I thought, 'You know what? I think this team can win the national championship.' There's times when we've played them at their place and got our heads handed to us and I left there thinking, 'You know what? I'm not sure we're a national championship-type team.
Some teams would have maybe gone from 17 down to 27 down right away. That says a lot about (Louisville).
Some teams would have gone from down 17 to down 27. They went on a 12-0 run. That says a lot about them.
One of the dangers that you run into when you have success so early, people tend to forget. It?s better to have success late then early because an awful lot of people may end up remembering whatever happened last year or whatever is going to happen this year.
It's different than it was two years ago, ... People buy into teams and into personalities. We were coming off a national championship and we had the dominant personality in the country. Now we're coming off losing in the Sweet 16 and we have a bunch of nice kids that are just happy to be here. Maybe I'm going to have to rile some people up, start saying and doing stuff that stirs the pot a bit.
I hate it because there's too much dead time. They don't do anything. I mean if sleeping was a sport these guys would be first-team All-American. So what happens is when there's so much dead time you've got to try to get them to understand that you've got to fill that time wisely.
No one ever talks about our defense. Our defense has always been good. But when you have great offensive players like I've coached the last 15 years, it's hard to concentrate on our defense. But our defense has been pretty good.
My initial reaction right now is I saw where it's going to be announced during the Final Four. So if I'm sitting here in Connecticut and there's four teams playing in Boston at the Final Four and I get a phone call, my first reaction is I'm going to be (mad) that I'm not at the Final Four. I can tell you that much. So if I happen to be in Boston with my team and I get that phone call, it'll be kind of a special weekend.
I know everybody has talked about parity the last couple of years, and it hasn't played out at the end of the season. But there does seem to be more even teams than in the past.
If you want to win the conference, every road trip is important. It is not just all pomp and circumstance on the road now where you just show up, go to a great dinner the night before, roll in and win by 30 and leave. Those days are over. There are some tough kids in our league.
I do remember my first NCAA win, how unbelievable it was. We won our first NCAA game, then our third and ended up going to the Final Four.
That would be pretty ironic, wouldn't it? Maybe it's meant to be that way. Hard to say, but it would be pretty neat. How about she's in the starting lineup at the Final Four and knocks in the first play of the game and scores 30 and is the MVP and rides off into sunset? You never know how it's going to be.